


a child not forgotten

by Pontmercyingtilthecowscomehome



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Complete, F/M, Gen, Jedi Leia Organa, Leia Organa-centric, One Shot, Slow Burn, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Spoilers, Time Skips, all ages are fuzzy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-30
Updated: 2019-12-30
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:15:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22025437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pontmercyingtilthecowscomehome/pseuds/Pontmercyingtilthecowscomehome
Summary: Padmé survives the birth of her children. She takes her daughter with her back to Naboo, where she becomes a spy for the Rebellion.In time, Leia follows in her mother's footsteps. On a mission, Leia encounters a small child in need.Leia vows to keep her safe.MAJOR Spoilers for The Rise of SkywalkerA very loose timeline AU in which Rey's parents ensure she's placed in a safe home.
Relationships: Bodhi Rook/Luke Skywalker, Cassian Andor & Leia Organa, Cassian Andor/Leia Organa, Leia Organa & Rey, Padmé Amidala & Leia Organa
Comments: 6
Kudos: 77





	a child not forgotten

**Author's Note:**

> MAJOR Spoilers for The Rise of Skywalker
> 
> This popped into my head after the movie. It's an odd AU to be sure, but I hope you enjoy!

Padmé lives. She lives out of pure spite, out of refusal to give up, lives because she is a survivor and that is what she must do. She lives, though childbirth is not easy and the men who watch over her know nothing of making it any easier. It is that, not a broken heart, which nearly kills her. Lack of proper medical care. Lack of understanding of the pain faced by a mother. Lack of understanding, at all, really, for who she is and what she has survived.

By the time her vitals have steadied, though, her son has already been taken from her. They tell her he’s safe on Tatooine, that she cannot go after him. She tells them that she will. That a child will never be forgotten again, not as long as she lives.

They tell her that her daughter needs her and that to keep her safe, she must not be brought near her twin brother. Their powers combined would be too great, too noticeable. They tell her that this is what is best, for all of them.

They don’t tell her that her husband lives. They merely tell her that the Emperor is seeking the last of the Skywalkers.

She thinks that her children are not the last of anything but the beginnings of a new and wonderful hope for the universe.

* * *

Padmé makes a home for herself, back on Naboo. Not with her family, as to not draw attention with them, but in a simple, well-furnished apartment, with plenty of space for her daughter to learn and grow.

There is plenty of room, too, for Padmé to join the Rebellion. She becomes one of their greatest assets and yet, her name is not known to any of them. She is merely Agent Halfheart, a moniker she takes because half of her heart is growing up without her, far away on a sandy planet. She hopes the twin suns there shine gently on him. She hopes he grows up more like his grandmother and less like his father.

She hopes a great deal of things but says none of them. She is too busy leading her own double life. By day she is a mother to a brilliant, trouble-making toddler, by night, she is a waitress at an upscale lounge for the elite of Naboo. Once, those elite had been people she trusted. Now, they are all Imperial officers, with harsh faces and cold, cold hands. She thinks, sometimes, that these men are colder than any battle droid she’s ever faced.

But they are still people and people can be convinced to talk.

Each week, she transmits information back to the other Rebellion cells. Each week, her daughter grows a little more. The child and the hope of the galaxy grow, together, linked as they have been since their birth.

* * *

Leia is two years old when she first uses the Force to call her favorite doll to her. GThe motion comes easily to her, so easily that had she been raised by another, perhaps they would have convinced the tiny girl that she had merely imagined it. After all, people can be convinced of a great deal of things.

And people can be wrong.

Padmé spends the next two nights hacking the holo-libraries for any books on Jedi training.

The Officers miss their favorite waitress, the one who always greets them with a bright smile and is always eager to overfill their favorite drinks. The budding Rebellion Alliance misses their greatest spy.

Padmé misses the man who had once been her husband, and misses the boy who should have been her son.

Leia learns to use the Force, not as a Jedi would, but as the daughter of a politician would. She uses it to alter other’s memories, to wave away their questions, to subtly shift their perceptions. She uses it, too, in her childhood scrapes with the other children of her town, who can never understand how the littlest among them can scale trees so quickly or hide so quietly.

On another planet, there is a little boy who sometimes thinks there is a little girl who wants to play tag with him, who laughs with him when he tells jokes to what his aunt thinks is the empty air. The two whisper together, sometimes at night or in the most quiet times of day, both of them thinking the other is just an imaginary friend.

Neither of them know the truth and for that, their mother is glad.

* * *

Time passes. Leia becomes a young woman, much in the image of her own mother. Her heart, too, belongs to the Rebellion, but she cannot do what her mother does. She cannot smile at officers, cannot pretend to care about their hollow boosts and horrible crimes they call honors. She is too much like her father; headstrong, bold, big-hearted.

Leia becomes a young woman whose heart is as equally full of yearning for justice and fury at the cruelness of the Empire. Their power is an ever-present thing in her life. Naboo is the Emperor’s home planet, after all, so it is there he sends his most prestigious and most terrible officers. Unlike on other worlds, they do not destroy the art and knowledge of the fair cities, but instead, they twist it. Statues that once represented the ideals of goodness and beauty are re-made in the image of the Emperor. Sheev’s face replaces the face of countless senators and kings, the goddess of the Sith replaces any queen’s stone visage.

Only one queen of Naboo remains, and her face is hidden under a scarf whenever she walks under the statues. Only one queen, and a former one at that, though her regal bearing serves her well as a waitress too. Only one queen, who will never abandon her planet.

With no heir, Alderaan’s own queen finds a young boy without a family, and raises Ezra as her own. She’d always wanted a daughter, but she finds a son is just as wonderful--though certainly a handful. The Rebellion grows, with leaders like that queen, her son, and so many others, from nobility to the lowest scoundrels of Mos Eisley.

* * *

On Naboo, though, the Rebellion’s light is squelched, crushed under the ever-present eye of the Emperor. In Theed, his statues eyes seem to watch all the citizens, ever-present, ever-furious. There is one young man in the city who wears a face quite similar to the one above, though his eyes have never held any of the cruelty that burns within his father’s. He keeps his own face hidden under a scarf, any time he passes below the statues that look too much like him and all he tries to forget.

Once, he watches as a young girl summons a rock to her hand and hurls it at the stone face of the Emperor. Watches as she curses the name, under her breath, in shockingly good Huttese, and watches as the troopers turn their attention to her.

She darts away and the man whose voice is nearly the same as the voice which controls the galaxy, says to the troopers, “there is no girl here. You saw no one.”

It is strange and rare for him to use his power, but he feels, deep with his bones, that this girl needed to be protected. When he tells his beloved that story, she tells him she hopes that one day, their own child will be just as brave.

Not that they have a child yet, of course. The hope that courses through the silent and shadowy parts of the galaxy is not yet ready for another to be born as strong in the Force as the twins seperated by lightyears and lies.

* * *

But the Galaxy’s hope grows, far from Naboo, as the side of the light recruits more to its ranks. A young man from an ice-covered world burns with the fire of rebellion, his voice igniting the hearts of all he recruits. The young Andor knows that there is hope, as long as they fight, though he has no idea that there is even hope on the locked-down planet of Naboo.

Agent Fulcrum and Agent Halfheart correspond regularly. Padmé senses that the young man is not much older than her own daughter, which makes her think of her son, and she hopes he is well.

More than that, she hopes he has found a slice of happiness even as the galaxy grows dark.

Meanwhile, her daughter is happiest when she is fighting, defending everyone from the lowest urchins to the government officials that still speak on behalf of the side of the light.

She’s arrested once, and draws on all her nascent powers of the Force to escape without a record. After that, her efforts grow smarter, and more dangerous.

She has too little of her mother in her, Obi-Wan thinks, when he feels Leia’s pull on the Force. Her powers are like a collapsing star, brighter each day, but with the threat of a supernova dawning each night.

He reaches out to his contacts, because Padmé is not the only one who never gave up on the fight, even as the names of the enemies and the allies changed. He reaches out and hopes, against hope, that Leia will not meet the same fate as the young Jedi who he had failed.

Obi-Wan reaches out, and for once, he is not let down.

* * *

Yoda finds that yes, perhaps, the girl is too old. Perhaps. But she is also brilliant and kind and patient in the way her father never was. (Yoda has dreams of being stuck training some other human, some one who did not offer snacks so readily and who whined a great dear more, and Yoda is relieved to know those things remain in dreams.After all, fond he is of snacks.)

Yoda teaches and Leia learns.

* * *

Leia learns, slowly at first, but each day, her control grows. Even still, she is not yet ready to leave when a battered Rebellion U-Wing lands on her planet. It is there, as booted feet touch muddy shore and the eyes of a former Sepertist meet the eyes of a child born of the Republic, that our story truly begins.

“Captain Cassian Andor,” the man says briskly, flashing his identification to Leia.

She folds her arms. “Aren’t you a little short for a Captain?”

“Aren’t you a little young for a Jedi warrior?”

“I am twenty-two years old, thank you very much!” her voice goes up an octave in her frustration, which just makes Cassian’s eyebrow lift.

“According to her vitals, Cassian,” K-2S0 reports, “she is lying.”

His hand slides easily to the holdout blaster on his thigh.

“Fine!” Leia snaps. “I’m twenty-one and a half.”

“That is correct.”

“And that was a lie worthy of reporting?” Cassian spins to glare at the droid. “Kaytu. How many times have I said _useful vitals._ That’s what I need to know. _Useful.”_

The droid shrugs. “It is not my fault you failed to give proper instructions. Correcting your clarity would improve our missions immensely.”

Leia giggles, behind her hand. She still has the manners of a girl raised by a former queen but the sense of humor of a prankster. “Is there something you two need of me?”

Cassian runs a hand through his hair, ruffling it a little bit. Leia thinks it’s a nicer haircut when he does that. She thinks, though she won’t admit it, that the captain is overall rather nice, at least in appearance, if not in personality.

“I have a request for Agent Halfheart,” he states, his words far more clipped now. “I was given the directive that the message goes to you, first.”

“Mm.” Leia returns her arms to their folded position over her chest. “And why do you think that is?”

“It was an order, ma’am. I did not question it.”

“Agent Halfheart is busy,” Leia says. She knows now that this man is part of the Rebellion, the very thing she has trained all her life to join. “I will go in her place.”

Leia’s request is not purely selfish. She knows her mother is growing older, has seen how she dyes away the grey hairs to remain ever-charming to the officers she plies with drinks, trading smiles for their government secrets. Leia loves her mother more than anything and will not let harm come to her.

She is, perhaps, too much like her own father in that way.

But Captain Andor is a realist, who senses that an offer from a real Jedi doesn’t come along every day, so he takes her hand. Their touch is like a signal fire, burning brightly along all the threads of the Force that span the galaxy.

Neither of them notice. Instead, Leia says, “your hand is _freezing.”_

Cassian thinks, _what in the name of all the stars did I agree to?_

They will not hold hands again, not for a long time. Because Cassian is a patient man, he remains on Dagobah while Leia completes her training. Because Cassian is a stubborn man, he refuses to name the emotions he has begun to feel for the smart, impossible young woman.

Because Leia is equally stubborn, she tells herself her heart is just nervous for what lies ahead, explaining away the flutter that happens in her chest whenever he looks at her.

Because both of them put the Rebellion first, neither of them mention such things to each other.

* * *

The two work together on the mission to retrieve the Death Star plans, aided by others who they never meet. As soon as it is destroyed, they are off, back into hyperspace, on yet another mission. Their skills complement each other’s, as much as their pasts make them at odds. A Jedi raised on the most Republic of Core Worlds and a spy whose childhood was spent as a Seperatist freedom fighter.

(Really, the Imperial Battle Droid who has saved both their lives countless times in the first few years is just the glaze on the uj cake, as the saying goes)

Over the years, the pair takes part in countless initiatives, though very few major battles. Their skills are better suited to the shadows. Even Leia’s lightsaber, a design of her own making, is a short, curved blade, made to be used in narrow alleys and boarded ships.

Cassian uses it only once to free her, but that is another story.

The Rebellion’s efforts become those of a shadowy resistance, led by spies such as Cassian and Leia. Rather than engage in massive space combat, they are trained to sneak onto ships, to sabotage, destroy, evade, and return. It is a sort of combat that saves lives, though it takes a great deal more time.

Perhaps in another galaxy, this conflict, between dark and light, would be over sooner. Perhaps it would have never begun. But in her heart, Leia feels that the dark side and the light side have always been at war, and that battle will never end.

One night, she and Cassian receive another mission request. This one startles her enough that she runs to find him. He’s in the front of the U-Wing, repairing K-2S0, and for a moment, Leia is distracted by how skillfully his hands move among the tiny wires.

“Your highness?” he asks, teasing her as he often does, lightly mocking the regal accent she learned from her mother.

“Captain,” she teases him back, because he has asked her to call him Cassian. Just Cassian. As if either of them are ever going to be allowed to be just one person. They have lived thousands of lives together as spies, yet none of them have been truly theirs. Their own lives are made up of stolen moments and tiny flashes of joy, lived far more in dreams than in reality.

“What was the message?”

“We’re to go to Naboo. A rescue mission.”

“For your mother?” he asks. She has let him know that part of her life, not realizing that is the least of her secrets.

She shakes her head. “Someone else. Three people, actually.” There is nothing else in the message about who these people are, only that the adults have useful information and the child needs to be kept safe. “Including a child.”

“A child.” Cassian’s eyebrows knit together.

“That is what she said,” K-2S0 adds. “I am concerned for your hearing. You often repeat Leia Theedsbe.”

“That’s because Leia Theedsbe is often right.”

Theedsbe is the last name given to any bastard child of the city, a name she has heard said with both affection and disgust by so many people in her life. When Cassian Andor says her name, though, it sounds nicer than anything else in the galaxy.

He nods at her. “You punch in the coordinates. I’ll get the weapons.”

“I don’t like Naboo,” K-2S0 states. “I have a bad feeling about this.”

* * *

The droid, after all, perhaps was right. The mission goes sideways nearly as soon as it’s begun. Their approach had been expected. Darth Vader himself had waited, more furious than ever, since every moment spent on Naboo is a moment trapped inside his worst nightmare.

Ben Kenobi slips out of the shadows, one last time. He only has a few moments to speak to the girl who watched him with the eyes of her mother and the intensity of her father. He tells her she has a brother. She tells him she already knows.

Then, he tells her that she must be the leader of a new Jedi order, someday, and that is enough to freeze her in her tracks.

Kenobi uses that chance to step forward, facing Vader so that the two rebel spies may go forward, darting into the cheap apartment complex where their targets are waiting.

Contact is made. The pair meets another pair. Skywalker meets Palpentine, though neither uses that name. And Cassian meets a woman who asks him only this, “save my child. Do not worry about us.”

Somewhere close by, Obi-Wan Kenobi falls.

Leia clutches her hand to her heart. It feels as if a piece of her has fallen away, as if a great light has grown dimmer. She reaches for Cassian’s hand, as she had back on Dagobah, turning to him, rather than her lightsaber. When his fingers wrap around hers, she takes a deep breath. In their cores, Skywallkers are better at loving than fighting.

“We move. Now.” Cassian says.

They duck out, running in the shadows of a city that had once been the most lovely in the galaxy. Blaster fire follows them. One bolt hits Cassian in the leg. He tumbles, falling down a high flight of stares.

Leia screams when his body goes limp at the bottom. She races down after him, tears mingling with the falling rain. When he lifts his head, relief blooms in her heart. But it is short-lived.

“Run!” Cassian says, pushing himself to his feet. “Kaytu is already in the ship. I’ll catch up.”

Leia looks at him, taking in his broken ribs, his stilted gait from a shattered leg. “You’ll never make it.”

“Thanks for the optimism.”

Stubbornly, Leia puts his arm around her shoulder. They’d told the couple to meet them at Padmé’s apartment, should they get separated. Now, all she can do is hope that her advice was listened to. “I’m worried,” she tells Cassian.

“Have hope,” he responds. “The Force is with us.”

* * *

An hour later, Leia and Cassian collapse in a tangle on Padmé’s couch. She’s already settled the other couple in the guest room which had once been Leia’s nursery. The babe sleeps in a crib that had once held Leia and is wrapped in a blanket that came from the Jedi temple itself.

Now, she turns her attention to her daughter and the man she’d been told was the Rebellion’s second-best spy. (Padmé was the best, of course.) She scans him over with her medkit, then shakes her head. “Cassian,” Padmé says. “You cannot go anywhere. You need to rest. To heal.”

“We have to complete the mission.”

“We will,” Leia promises. “Have hope.”

“Fill me in,” Padmé asks her daughter. She speaks now as she had once, as a queen, who knows the fate of the galaxy may be decided in the next few minutes.

They do, as quickly as they can. The couple and their child need to be escorted to the Rebel base on Fest.

“A cold place for a child,” Padmé says. She remembers the planet as a battleground of a long-ago war. Or perhaps it was the same war?

“Not always,” Cassian replies with the ghost of a smile.

There are hurried whispers among all of them. The escape must be tonight, though it is too risky for a child to cross at the only access point left, before the blockade. Separating the child from the parents will make it safer. Padmé protests. She knows, more than anyone, what it feels like to leave a child behind.

The child’s mother squeezes Padmé’s hand. “She will be safe here with Leia. I know it to be true.”

And Padmé knows what it feels like to be a mother who trusts in the kindness of strangers, as well. “If you wish it, let it be so.”

The plan is decided upon, then, though it nearly breaks more than one heart. The young couple, who everyone in the room knows to be the son of the Emperor and his wife, though no one will speak such a thing out loud, will cross the city to a rendezvous point. Padmé will go on her own, meeting at the same point. There, K-2S0 will be waiting with the ship.

Padmé has the access codes needed to enter a Rebel base. K-2S0 is a better pilot than any in the room, barring Cassian, who is still insisting he is fine, despite four broken ribs and a shattered femur.

“Then it’s settled.” Leia says.

“May the Force be with us all,” Padmé whispers, as if the Force has not been something as close as her own heartbeat to her for so long.

* * *

The couple never makes it to their rendezvous point. The Emperor's son protects his wife from the stormtroopers til his last breath. Her last is used, not to curse those who have taken everythingf from her, but to call out to the Force, asking it to watch over them all.

K-2S0 is forced to flee with a sobbing Padmé in the seat next to him. Darth Vader, distantly, feels a strange ache in his hollow chest.

The blockade closes in and Naboo is cut off from the rest of the galaxy.

In that tiny apartment, Cassian sleeps and Leia rocks a baby that is not hers. Time passes, every night similar to that one, every day different. Leia takes over her mother’s role as a waitress. Cassian teaches and cares for the child as his bones heal.

Soon, the child is old enough to know her own name, though it is far too long for her. When Cassian teases her gently, telling her she speaks way, way, too quickly, she starts to call herself “Way” and that becomes Rey, once she is old enough to say all her letters.

The simple name works well as an alias, and neither of her guardians tell her she once had another name.

Leia wonders, sometimes, why the child feels familiar to her, as if some part of her heart is woven together with this little one’s. It’s a feeling she cannot explain, any more than she can explain her heart’s longing for Cassian, the way it skips when he holds her in bed, keeping her as safe as he can from her nightmares.

Vader is searching for her, calling to her in her dreams. But Leia is strong and stubborn and will not go to him, no matter how much he beckons. And when he tells her that he is her father, Leia is unmoved. After all, she had spent the morning with a babbling, teething granddaughter of the Emperor. What more proof does she need to believe that the dark side is not part of anyone’s nature?

In the meantime, Cassian conveys what he can of the plans back to the Alliance. He is an Imperial officer, after all, (at least, according to the albili paperwork he had with him) and no one boasts as much as one officer to another. He tells the Alliance, too, about another forgotten child, now grown to be as old as himself.

When a young man recruits Jyn Erso to the cause, because he too knows what is like to be left behind, the tide of the war starts to shift. And when that young man, otherwise known as the best pilot in the Rebellion, meets a pilot who wants to escape the Imperial forces that have destroyed his planet, then the Rebellion grows ever stronger. Their names become a mantra whispered over the comms. Jyn, Bodhi, Luke. Most of all, Luke Skywalker. The hero of countless skirmishes, the most daring pilot. The last hope of the Rebellion.

Each time this man is mentioned, this Luke Skywalker, Leia feels a funny tug somewhere deep in her bones. She ignores it, of course, as she has learned to ignore so many things, so that the tasks of the day can be done.

And in raising a child, they both find, the tasks are nearly endless. When a child is strong in the Force, well, the tasks merely grow in magnitude. Leia's lightsaber hangs behind a picture on the wall, out of sight but never out of her mind. She knows she is a warrior and a mother both. This child, she knows, will be worth any fight they face.

* * *

Rey is three years old when the Empire topples. Her parents celebrate. She claps, though she doesn’t understand anything more than the sheer joy that shines on their faces.

She knows nothing of the people who risked it all. Names that Leia and Cassian whispered to each other have become the heroes lauded on all the now-uncensored channels. Bodhi Rook. Luke Skywalker. Jyn Erso. Lando Calrissian. And so many more.

But the greatest hero of all had been Agent Halfheart, who had finally found her son, had aided in his training, and stood by his side when he faces the man who had been his father. There is nothing that is left a shattered half within her, not anymore. She has found her children, held them close, and she has faced down the man who she had once loved. Her heart is all hers once again, and she is happy.

Her son is happy too, to learn he has more family. His lover, Bodhi Rook, is welcomed by Padmé as another son, which makes the young man nearly weep. He has lost his family, his planet, and nearly all his hope for the future. Now, he thinks, the tide is changing. The Light Side is winning, just as his own mother had once promised him it would. Luke's smile promises the same thing to Bodhi, and so much more beside. The shadows are dispelled, not just for them, but for the whole Rebellion.

When Padmé comes back to Naboo, this time it is not in secrecy but in a great deal of pomp and circumstance (which is, of course, Naboo’s preferred way of doing things.) When she returns, she returns to her daughter, who has survived, hidden in a web of lies and shadows, safe in the apartment Padmé had left her in

Padmé returns to find that her daughter was more than just a partner in the Rebellion to Cassian. Sometie, in those long days and cold nights, Leia had melted his heart and he had earned her trust. (Both nearly impossible feats in their own right.) They had cared for Rey as their own and had come to care for each other as husband and wife.

However, the couple did refuse a formal wedding, due to the dislike of the aforementioned Naboo-based pomp and circumstance.

* * *

Once the space dust settles, Padmé gathers them all together. Her son, her son’s husband, her daughter and her daughter’s partner, and Rey, the child who is not theirs, and yet, was family to them all. Padmé explains what she had never had the chance to before. Luke and Leia had each known fragments of the truth, but together, the whole story appears before them.

“But what of Rey?” Leia says, when the tea has been drank and the story has been told. “Mother, we cannot just abandon her.”

“Of course not,” Padmé replies.

“And without Ben, or Yoda…” Luke begins. His own training has been even more fragmented than his sister. “Who will train her?”

“You two will,” Padmé says, nodding at her children. “Together. My dearest twins, you were born with light and shadow inside you. The same light, the same shadow, as Rey.”

“But she--”

“She is my daughter,” Leia says suddenly, color high in her cheeks. She knows it to be true now, knows that Rey’s parents who entrusted her to Leia would have it no other way. “Luke, she is my daughter now.”

“And mine, then.” Cassian’s voice is gruff, but his hand which reaches out to clasp Leia’s, is gentle. “We’ve come this far. If a Seprastist can become a Rebellion officer, and a Jedi can become a waitress, then surely, a Palpatine can become a…”

“Naberrie,” Padmé says the name she had kept secret for so long. Secret, but not forgotten. Her children too, were never forgotten. Now they are here, together, and her family has grown by an order of magnitude. Family that will never be forgotten again. The former queen, the former spy, the mother who waited so long for this day says, “That is my family name. I pass it on to all of you, in the hopes that it is carried well.”

Rey Naberrie looks up at her family and smiles. The past, then, is forgotten, and the future is bright as dawn.

  


  


  



End file.
